


One By One We Fall Asleep

by gala_apples



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Healers, M/M, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 08:38:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gala_apples/pseuds/gala_apples
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Bob volunteers to go in stasis in the middle of a planet wide pandemic, he's not expecting to wake up. He does. It's not the same world he fell asleep in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One By One We Fall Asleep

Bob offers to go to sleep. A lot of people don’t qualify. There needs to be some semblance of health, no second or third stage patients. A lot of people don’t want to bother. The technology is unproven, no one has been woken up, never mind people with already compromised systems. Bob qualifies. He’s only in stage one - there are no people left uninfected, he’s about the best they’re going to get. As for the second, it’s not that he’s optimistic. He’s fully aware there’s a good chance it won’t work. It’s just certain current life doesn’t, and low odds are better than no odds.

Bob wakes up. 

It’s somewhat of a shock. 

It’s made more so by how it happens; he comes to with a mouth on his. It’s not resuscitation. Not that he should be resuscitated as such, the infection has to be crawling in his saliva. Bob knows what resuscitation is like, when he was eleven he nearly drowned at the public pool thanks to a moronic holding your breath contest. This isn’t that. It’s not quite a dirty kiss, he’s not being slipped the tongue. But it’s not innocent either. The person kissing him is doing it with feeling.

He doesn’t so much push the stranger off as sort of squirm in place in a questioning manner. For one thing, his limbs still feel kind of asleep. He’s not sure he _could_ push the person enough to actually get them off, or even raise his arms. For another, he hasn’t been kissed in a while, even not counting the years or decades he’s been asleep. Being kissed doesn’t suck. For a third, it’s not like they woke him up just to make out with him. To wake him, a disease vector, they must have thought they could cure him. It’s entirely possible he’s already cured and this is just a good morning kiss. Bob’s confused, but willing to go with it.

It’s a good thing he can breath through his nose. The kiss goes on for a long time. The longer it goes, the more he starts to become aware. There are more people than just the kisser in the room. He can only see them as a blur out of his peripheral, but they’re there. His back is not on the jelly they put him to sleep on, but a bed. Not a medical, plastic covered bed for easy cleaning, an actual pillowtop Serta Sleep Center mattress.

He’s not at all surprised when they help him stand, then put him in isolation. The room has a bed, and lighting, but not much else. Bob can’t really blame them for wanting to check for symptoms. Considering the world he fell asleep in, where every citizen had two choices; dead or asymptomatic carrier cursed to fuck over everyone they come into contact with, he should be isolated. At least for a week, until they see if he’s dead or fine. After that the scientists can test the ‘fine’, see what kind of definition it falls under. 

Except they don’t wait a week. The next morning his cell door opens. It’s the second of the two, the one that only watched yesterday. He enters Bob’s cell without a Hazmat suit, without even a cup over his mouth and nose. The only thing Bob can figure is he must have a death wish. Maybe this is the equivalent of suicide by cop.

“Have you given any thought to what you want to do for the rest of your life?” 

He doesn’t sound like he has a death wish though. And he’s smiling. Maybe he’s just insane.

Planning for any sort of future seems pathetically naive. “Depends on if I’m around to live it.”

The redhead smiles. He has small teeth. “Oh, don’t worry. You’re well.”

“No offense, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Honest, we really did cure you. Well, Mikey did, actually, not me. Don’t you remember yesterday?”

“What, when the blond got his mack on?” Unless this Mikey did something to him before he was awake, but then why would he be expected to remember it?

“You- Okay. I’ll be right back.”

And he is. It’s less than ten minutes later that he comes back with the blond. Mikey. The redhead pulls a knife, and before Bob can figure out what he said wrong so he can backpedal and not get stabbed, the redhead slits his wrist. It’s not a suicide attempt, it’s across the wrist, not up it, but it’s still more than Bob ever wanted to see. He’s not sure what the redhead’s reasoning is, he just really hopes this new culture isn’t into modified seppuku. Accidentally shaming someone into suicide is a shitty first impression.

“You see this, right?”

“Yes.” Please, god, let that be the right answer. As bad as it seems now, with his blood running down his palm and dripping off his fingertips, there a bunch of ways it could get worse.

The redhead turns to Mikey. They start kissing. It looks like the same sort of forceful kiss he felt yesterday. Unlike Bob, the recipient is responsive. There’s no question that they fit well together, for all the height difference. Bob’s never made a secret of being into couples, or sets of friends. There’s just something incredibly sexy about two people that know how to make each other react. He could be aroused by this, if he wasn’t so confused.

When they separate, the redhead shows Bob his wrist. His skin is still streaked with drying blood but the wound is gone. Completely gone, not even a scar. It’s like the slash was never there. So Mikey’s a healer? It seems slightly more sane than the word wizard. Mikey must be some kind of healer, except instead of laying on of hands, he lays on of lips.

“So, your future.”

Bob shrugs in reflex, then thinks about it. Being a healer would be pretty awesome, probably. “Can I do that?”

“I don’t know if you can. So far one of the people from your time has found their rightener. You may be able to, too.”

“I don’t understand?”

“What makes rightening work is finding the one person that can righten you. If I didn’t have Gerard but I tried to righten you afterward you’d feel better but I’d be just as sick as you once were.”

“Which is fair,” Gerard throws in. “Some people love someone else enough that they’ll righten them no matter what the cost.”

“But mostly you want to leave it to the ones with bond-righteners, like me and Gerard. When two people’s bond is perfect in every way, physically, emotionally, mentally, and beyond, the universe can sense it. It grants the couple a break. I can righten you and get ill, and then my bond-rightener rightens me with no side effects.”

That makes sense, probably. Bob’s not exactly a sci-fi buff, he doesn’t know how mutations work. But it’s probably like how rhinos and birds are symbiotic, and it works for them, even though the average person looking at a rhino covered in birds would just laugh. Something about tag team healing works for Mikey and Gerard -for the society, from the sound of it- and it doesn’t need to seem sensical to him.

“When do I get out of holding?”

“What?” Gerard looks confused, and Mikey the same. “I don’t understand.”

“This room. My cell. If you know I’m healthy now, why do I have to stay?”

Mikey shakes his head, bangs moving. “This isn’t a cell. You’re in one of the singles housing units. Putting large numbers of single people together raises your chances of finding your rightener.”

“Ways!” The voice is loud and commanding. If it was calling out his name, he’d snap to it.

“I guess we’re needed. Best of luck, Bob.”

He doesn’t see them again for a month. He doesn’t think about them a lot, he’s too busy setting up a new life. The room in the singles apartment is free, but furnishings aren’t, nor are clothes or food. For those he needs money, a job. After scanning the job postings bulletin board he goes with manufacturing. It’s not the assembly line job it once was. He’s learning glasswork. They’re big on glass here. It’s not an entirely renewable resource, it is made from sand and sand is finite. Still, it can be recycled easily. That sort of thing is important in this society. 

Bob’s got a weekly quota. That’s the way this industry works; not by hours logged, but by pieces made. It doesn’t matter if it takes him seven nineteen hour days, or if he can get it all done in one day, he gets paid the same. He’s in the middle of making another glass when he doesn’t turn the blowpipe fast enough, and a piece of the gather drips. It sears its way down his leg as he screams. Over the screams, the craftmaster shouts for a rightener. 

When the set run in, Bob’s mind is mostly gone with agony. It’s not until Gerard is white with pain and kissing Mikey to be rightened himself that he sees them. The third time is as perfect as the first two. Watching them, he can see why they were granted something so special.

Bob regrets that he wasn’t in the moment. Looking back, he liked the feel of Mikey against him. He’s sure Gerard would have been just as good. It’s so easy to forget that it doesn’t mean the same thing here as it would at home. But his home is gone, lost to time and a brutal pandemic. And in this place, his new home, a tongue stroking along his doesn’t mean someone wants him. Bob can’t initiate another kiss before getting into bed with them both. He’s not going to get kissed again until he gets hurt again. It’s a hard truth he’ll have to live with, just like all the other truths that come with living post apocalypse.


End file.
